


Step Eight

by Arsenic



Series: One Night Stand [4]
Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-09
Updated: 2008-08-09
Packaged: 2020-05-07 05:58:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19203289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/Arsenic
Summary: A coda to "Broken Ties", probably won't make sense if you haven't seen the ep.





	Step Eight

 

 

Mikey came awake to the buzzing of his pelvis and the annoyed realization that he'd clearly fallen asleep on his phone. He pulled it up, peered at the screen and noticed the time first. Three oh seven. Normally, that would have been enough for Mikey to just turn over and go back to sleep, figure he could deal with it in the morning, but there was only one number in the world that could bypass Mikey's block on unidentified callers. Mikey pressed talk. "Ronon?"

"It's John, Mikey. I-- Sorry, it's late on Earth, isn't it?"

Mikey tried to swallow. "John--"

"He's alive, Mikey. He's alive and he's going to be fine."

"Going to be," Mikey said, because he'd been with Ronon long enough. He knew what it meant when John or Rodney or Teyla called him instead of Ronon.

"Where are you?"

"Uh, gimme a second." Mikey fell out of his bunk and knew, knew that the others had been listening, when nobody told him to be quiet. He made his way to the driver and said, "Heya, um. Where are we?"

Trent looked at Mikey out of the corner of his eye and seem to assess that the question called for a more specific answer than 'bumfuck Egypt.' "About thirty miles out of Odessa, Texas."

Mikey squeezed Trent's shoulder.

"You got that, John?"

"Yeah. Mikey, I need you to get off in Odessa and walk..." there was some mumbling on the other side of a line, "about a half a mile west. Do you have a compass?"

"I, uh. I think the bus has one? I'll figure it out."

"Mikey, I-- He needs you."

Mikey had pretty much gotten there on his own, but, "I'll talk with the guys."

There was a long silence, into which Mikey felt like John wanted to say something, but in the end, all he said was, "Thanks."

 

*

"How long?" Gerard asked.

"I don't know," Mikey admitted. "I don't think we're talking about a couple of days."

Gerard looked uneasy, and Mikey understood. He didn't like the thought of letting Gerard out of his sight for that long either. But John had sounded... John had sounded scared. And it wasn't that Mikey didn't know John scared, Mikey was as aware of the team's humanity as anyone. It was that John only scared for good reason. Mikey said, "You can tell people I relapsed."

"No," Frank said in the tone of voice that Mikey knew translated to (and meant) Over My Dead Body.

"Upsets fans anyway," Gerard agreed. "I don't know how many more unicorn plushies we can even donate."

"Guess that takes out telling them I'm sick, then, huh?"

"We could tell people he's taking a spiritual journey and be sketchy on the details."

They all looked at Ray as one. He shrugged. "We've only got like four shows left on this leg. We push back the next one, say that Mikey had a calling. People'll question it, but they question everything we tell them. Mostly they'll probably just believe that Mikey needed to find his path, or whatever."

Bob was the first one to laugh. "He's kinda right, you know?"

Frank outright giggled, and that was it, the five of them were lost to the humor.

 

*

They beamed him fucking up. Mikey sat for a moment, pressed a hand to his other arm and said, "Well. Okay."

A private met him, seeming kind of confused as to why someone was being beamed onto the ship randomly in the middle of Texas. Mikey considered this to be fair enough. The private looked at him apologetically and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but you're constricted to quarters and the mess."

Mikey said, "Oh. Uh. Are there any books on board?"

"We can hook you into the mainframe, you can access pretty much any book you want."

Nice. Mikey hefted his bass in front of him and said, "Okay, show me where to go."

 

*

Mikey watched the stars streak past his window in the black of space for all eighteen days and never thought, "Old."

 

*

John came to meet him when he arrived wherever they were going. He led him into a hallway that looked a lot like something Mikey had seen in a Star Trek episode once and said, "Welcome to Atlantis."

Mikey smiled and ran his hand over the wall. "Like the lost city?"

"Exactly like that," John said, staring at Mikey's hand.

Mikey looked over to see what was so interesting and noticed the lights in the corridor beaming brighter over each spot Mikey touched. "Huh. Is that some kind of touch-dependent technology?"

"Of a sort," John said, and there was something in his tone that Mikey didn't quite understand.

Still, he got that asking too many questions would probably only cause problems for John. He was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to be here in the first place. "Cool." He paused for a second. "So, um. Ronon."

John's face hardened slightly. "I-- How much-- See, we don't really talk--"

"Is this about the Wraith?"

"So. You know what they did to him?"

"I know."

"It's about the Wraith," John confirmed, and started explaining.

 

*

Mikey walked into the gym, ignoring the fact that Ronon was twirling around a stick the size of Mikey. He said, "John said you wouldn't come to me."

Ronon stopped in his tracks, stick mid-air, poised dangerously close to Mikey. Mikey didn't move. Ronon growled, "Get out of my way."

But Mikey had grown up with a brother, even if that brother hand been Gerard. He just stood his ground. "Make me."

Ronon's grip on the stick tightened, his knuckles whitening. Mikey said, "It took me over two weeks to get here. You could at least say hi."

Ronon dropped the stick, then, somehow drooping in his own skin. Mikey moved in, touched his fingers to Ronon's shoulders, his lips to the taut line of Ronon's jaw. Ronon said, "You shouldn't have come."

Mikey said, "But I did," and spent a little time showing Ronon he was glad he was there.

 

*

Mikey couldn't run like Ronon could run, but he could wander with the best of them and he could meet Ronon where Ronon needed to stop, pushed beyond the edge of his own limits, breath broken and loud. Mikey could sit by him and not say anything, could wait for him to say something. And Mikey could handle the silence when he didn't.

 

*

Mikey wasn't really awake when Ronon started talking. He woke to a rumble underneath his chest and wasn't quite sure where he was until the pattern of the hand laid flat over his back became familiar. Then he said, "Hey. Hey, what?"

"I betrayed them."

Mikey was sort of used to the fact that Ronon didn't waste time, his or other people's, but he was also used to Ronon's silence about the things that mattered most. He wasn't sure if he was surprised that Ronon had started there or not. He said, "No. It doesn't work that way."

"Mikey--"

"When I was fucked up-- When I, I mean, I used to say shit to Gee and the others that you don't even, you think pulling a sword one someone is bad? Giving them over to an enemy? I guess, I mean, I see where you're coming from, but I would use everything I knew about the people I loved most to destroy them just because my brain had stopped being anything but the liquor and the pills. It wasn't even desperation for them; I could _have_ them whenever I chose. It was just an inability to remember any of the important parts of myself or to stop myself from remembering all the important parts of them."

"But--"

"And I _chose_ that."

"Mikey."

"I did." Mikey wasn't proud of it, would never be proud of it, but there was something in owning the decision. "I had other options. I took that one."

"You chose to fight, too." Ronon said softly.

"John says if you hadn't you would never have survived the detox, so you can just fuck right off if you're going to act like you wouldn't have if you'd been able to at all. Jesus."

"Mikey--"

"When they put that thing in you and they made you run, you let yourself think you were at fault when people got hurt around you then, too. But it wasn't. It was their fault. Because they were hurting those people. Just because you were there doesn't make you the guilty party. It didn't then and it doesn't now. There's a reason chemical addiction is used as a form of mind control: because it works. I don't give a shit who you are, it works. And maybe _maybe_ there's one person in a trillion out there who wouldn't have given in, who could have and would have kept fighting, _maybe_ , but if you're going to blame yourself for not being that one person, well. That's kind of ridiculously stupid."

"If you ask McKay--"

"No. He likes to pretend. But no, if I asked, that's not what he'd say at all."

It was a long, long time before Ronon said, "I know." There was a break at the end of the word, and underneath Mikey, Ronon's chest was moving too rapidly for him to simply be breathing, but Mikey stayed silent and still and let the worst of the grief pass. An hour came and went, and Mikey didn't say a word.

When Ronon was able to take slightly longer, drier breaths, Mikey pressed a kiss to his shoulder and said, "Sleep. _Sleep._."

 

*

Mikey woke up ten hours later to find himself still tightly tucked in Ronon's grasp, Ronon sleeping so hard as not to be roused by Mikey's waking, which had never before happened. He stayed where he was, stayed and stayed and stayed until Ronon was ready to come back to him, back to the world.

 

*

By the time Ronon was awake it was more lunchtime than breakfast, and the two of them made their way to the mess. Rodney and John were there, sitting across from each other and Mikey felt more than saw Ronon slow his step ever so slightly, but in the end he didn't stop, he kept moving. Ronon sat next to Rodney, who was closer and Mikey sat down on Ronon's other side.

Rodney said, "Food's over there, no scavenging," but he was smiling as he said it.

John said, "Hey Mikey," and nodded at Ronon. "How's earth?"

"Still rotating around the sun," Mikey told him.

"SGC must be holding up their end of the bargain."

Mikey hadn't a clue what that meant, but he nodded. John wasn't really watching him, anyway, he was watching Ronon. Ronon was able to handle the perusal for all of a moment before he said, "Hungry," and went off to go get food.

Mikey opened his mouth, but Rodney just said, "Better than he's been in a while."

"Get yourself some lunch," John said. "We'll wait."

 

*

Teyla arrived as they were finishing up. She deposited her son in Ronon's arms without listening to his half-expressed protests and went to get herself some food. Her son, for his part, looked up at Ronon placidly for a moment before falling back asleep.

Mikey looked over Ronon's shoulder. Softly he said, "Nobody ever lets me hold babies." Not that he was around them a whole lot, but even when his cousins had had children, everyone had known that Mikey wasn't allowed to hold them unless he was on the couch, and supervised.

"Why?"

Mikey frowned. "Sometimes I forget what I'm doing."

"You really--" Rodney started, but Mikey cut him off with, " _Once_. It was one fucking time. And I was like nineteen. Shut up."

Ronon didn't say a word. He did wrap one arm around Mikey, pull him in against his side, and shift the baby so that they were both supporting him. Mikey said, "Soft."

Ronon said, "Yeah," but when Mikey glanced up, his gaze wasn't focused on the baby. It was fixed squarely on Mikey.

 

*

Ronon took Mikey up to one of the top levels of Atlantis, somewhere Mikey suspected they weren't really supposed to be. He fucked Mikey with Mikey's hips pressed up against the railing, wind and water whipping over his face. Afterward, Ronon still in him, arms still around his chest, Mikey took a second to feel, really feel the way he was almost floating above everything. He said, "You didn't let me fall."

"I wouldn't," Ronon said, softly, firmly.

"I know," Mikey said. "Just. Checking if you did."

Ronon buried his face in Mikey's neck, kissing at the curve. It was enough of an answer.

 

*

Ronon beamed on to the Daedalus with Mikey and stood in his room for a moment. He made the space feel smaller. Mikey didn't mind. Ron said, "I would go back with you."

Mikey shook his head. Not right now. "Your team needs you."

After a moment, Ronon nodded. It was a hesitant nod, but a nod all the same. Mikey walked over to him and kissed him, long and slow and a little bit wistful. "When you get a moment, though."

Ronon cracked a smile, which allowed Mikey one. Mikey said, "Yeah," and Ronon echoed, "Yeah."

 


End file.
